Tag: extinction

A number of scholars of post-humanity (such as Hayles and Wolfe) have argued that transhumanism is an unduly optimistic extension of humanism. I can’t agree – not only is it not optimistic, it is not a humanism. Transhumanism is filled with the anxiety of extinction. It also is enthused enough about non-human flourishing that it marks a departure from humanism (besides: is anything more optimistic than humanism in its enlightenment mode?). Transhumanism’s posthumanist stance is the continuation of enlightenment technoscience in so far as it centralizes human technology, even if it projects the technoscientific breakdown of humanity. However, insofar as its ideas and projected technologies propose an almost panpsychic collapse of mind and matter, it pushes us beyond reductive materialist, secular and humanist arrangements, and points to some interesting new openings. (read more...)

This anthropocene thing has really taken hold. We’re caught in the grips of extinction, visualizing our own end (or at least visualizing the data of our own end), urgently calling upon each other to act, convincing ourselves that we have the power – scientifically, technologically and maybe politically – to do something about it. We can organize marches, resurrect species, bank seeds, manipulate clouds, make videos of collapsing ice caps, drive hybrids, fly to space stations. Of course, our worry over the planet’s health is narcissistic, in the end. It’s not the planet’s survival we are worried about. It’s our own, human future.
These anthropocentric worries over human continuity make for a strange tension in the theoretical moment: they are appearing just as a range of disanthropic moves have attempted to decenter and displace the human as subject, agent, or figure: Actor-Network Theory, Post-Humanism, multi- and interspecies analytics, Object Oriented and other “ontological” turns, speculative realism and new materialism, to name a few. Despite this turn away from the human, however, the final disappearance of the species seems to mark a limit for most disanthropic theorists; few welcome the possibility of human extinction. Disanthropy yes, misanthropy no. (read more...)